


Dead Leaves

by synfy



Category: Raven Cycle - Maggie Stiefvater
Genre: Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, M/M, Nightmares, the violence is not actually that graphic but better safe than sorry
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-17
Updated: 2020-04-17
Packaged: 2021-03-01 23:13:21
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,490
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23695216
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/synfy/pseuds/synfy
Summary: Adam is back in town and he has a nightmare. Ronan is there, as always.
Relationships: Ronan Lynch/Adam Parrish
Comments: 3
Kudos: 81





	Dead Leaves

Adam woke up hot. Burning hot, raging hot. Whisps of his nightmare still clung to him like scabs, his father's fists and his mother's stare, and Adam felt the fury from the dream bleeding out into his waking senses. There was an arm slung over his waist, and blankets tangled around his legs. The limb felt like a burning brand where it touched his skin, and the blankets were far too restricting. Adam tried to kick them off, anger rising in his chest when they didn't immediately pull away from his body. He fought off the urge to fling the offending arm away from him, to dig his nails into the pale skin and grip until he saw blood.

When the blankets were finally off of him, he didn't even trust himself to touch the arm, simply let it slip away as he got out of the bed. He didn't once look back at the body still sleeping as he ducked out of the master bedroom and softly padded down the stairs, anger humming in his body. His fingers found the cold knob of the front door with ease in the dark, and he stepped out into the night air.

The cold stung his lungs, and every inch of his exposed skin, but Adam couldn't think past his anger to care. He felt like he was radiating off heat, his blood boiling and singing in rage. He reached out and gripped the wooden post at the end of the railing, letting the splintered wood bite into the calluses on his palm. He sucked in a harsh breath and closed his eyes. He let himself imagine a scenario where his father wasn't there, and he got back to the double-wide late. Imagine a scenario where his mother was the one standing in front of him, face flushed, berating him for being a disappointment. A scenario where it was his mother's hand that he felt on his face, open palmed and with the stinging catch of nails. Where he could return the favour with a closed fist and a straight back, no remorse or fear. Adam imagined seeing fear on someone else's face for once, rather than feeling it on his own. Someone else's blood, someone else's bruises.

Adam gritted his teeth and punched the post, as hard as he could. It wasn't a right hook, like his father favoured, meant to swing through and knock the other person down while minimising damage to your own hand. Instead, he pushed into the blow with his shoulder, so his hand connected dead-on with the wood, no angle, maximum force, maximum recoil. It hurt, but the pain only seemed to fuel the screaming bloodlust, so he did it again. This time, the house shook, and his second knuckle started to bleed a little from the scrape. His bones ached. He pulled his arm back to go again, but he could feel his muscles shaking, so he dropped it.

Slowly, the anger drained out of him, replaced with guilt and shame. Of course it would be his mother that he imagined. He was still, at heart, just a scared little boy in front of his father. To weak to defend himself, to terrified to fight back. Of course his mind would go to his mother, a weaker person, an easier target. Adam Parrish, just like Robert Parrish, was a coward. The cold air bit into his skin and Adam hugged his arms around himself.

Behind him, the front door opened. "Want a blanket?"

Adam turned to see Ronan, huddled in a green plaid blanket that he must have grabbed of the couch. He was holding out a thicker maroon blanket from their bedroom. Ronan yawned, affecting sleepiness, but his eyes were sharp. He had been awake from the moment Adam left the bed. Adam accepted the blanket and wrapped it around himself.

"Thanks. Sorry about that." He nodded towards the abused post. Ronan shrugged.

"It's a shitty piece of wood anyway. Probably deserved it." He shuffled over to stand by Adam against the railing of the front porch, and neither of them spoke for several minutes.

"Do you want to go for a drive?" Ronan offered after a while.

Adam thought about it. Going for a drive was part of their late night routine. If one of them woke up from a nightmare, too keyed up too sleep, they'd both get in the BMW and take off down the empty roads. They took turns driving, though whoever was behind the wheel always floored it past speed limits, heading out in a hurry together to absolutely nowhere, and usually not returning until the sun was beginning to peak over the mountains. But the buzzing anger that had burned in him had settled into something calmer, more tired. He shook his head.

Ronan nodded, and didn't say anything else, giving him time to speak on his own terms. In moments like this, Adam was almost overwhelmed by how known he felt.

He clasped the blanket around him with his left hand, and let his right feel along the grain in the wood of the railing. Ronan mirrored him, brushing the tips of their fingers together in a question. Adam nodded and let Ronan take his hand and pull it up to his face for a careful examination of his bruised and scraped knuckles. He set their entwined hands back down on the railing between them once he was sure there were no splinters in the scrape.

"I didn't think going back would bother me. I really didn't. I went days without even thinking about him at Harvard, and I just assumed that's how it would be from now on." Adam kept his voice barely above a whisper. Even so, Ronan heard him, and Adam could feel the stiffening in Ronan's body as he misinterpreted Adam's words. He squeezed Ronan's fingers, just enough to pull his attention back.

"When we left Nino's earlier, after Blue and Gansey and Henry had gone, I was looking at the gutters. At Harvard, the gutters are full of dead leaves, dirt, and bottle caps. Here, it's just dead leaves. Outside Nino's, it's dead leaves, cigarettes, and that Henrietta dust. It's just like... Well. You know what it's just like." Adam tried to let the words fall out of him without thinking about them too much. It was something he was working on. With Ronan, things seemed to go better if he didn't allow himself to overthink every sentence. This time, it worked.

Ronan's shoulders eased. "Yeah. I do know."

"It's so stupid, there will be other places with cigarettes and dust in the gutters. I don't want to be bothered by it. I hate that I am." Adam sucked in a breath. "I don't want to spend the rest of my life running from the trailer park, refusing to look in gutters because I might freak out about them, waking up with _fucking nightmares_ that make me so angry that I..."

He cut himself off, biting his lip harshly. There were words right there, just behind his teeth, that desperately wanted to come out. Adam wasn't sure he wanted Ronan to hear them yet.

"You're not turning into him." Ronan, as usual, didn't give a shit about what Adam didn't want him to hear. "Sure, you get angry. That's not fucking special. I get angry, Blue gets angry, Gansey gets angry. You and your dad don't have a monopoly on that shit. But you've never hurt any of us. That's the difference."

"Haven't I?" Adam pushed himself away from the railing, whirling around and beginning to pace along the porch. "What about the demon? You had bruises for weeks, Blue's eyebrow is still scarred. How about the look Gansey gets whenever he tried to buy me something and I completely flip out on him?"

Ronan turned around, watching him with a completely blank expression. "The demon wasn't you, we've been over this. The Gansey thing is a misunderstanding of boundaries. You don't do things that will hurt people just because you want to, even when you get mad."

"What about you, then?" A part of Adam knew that he was pushing it, that he was about to go too far, but the anger was thrumming through his body again, eager to make his point. "When we're together, you barely leave marks on me. You're so careful about hickeys, and I don't even think twice about shredding your arms. Hell, I've seen the look on your face after you have to pull me back from scrying. You're so deathly afraid of hurting me, of hurting anyone, that you'd rather just go hurt yourself. You get mad and you go on huge benders that fuck you up, and no one else. I get mad and I'm utterly horrible to everyone, I make everyone else feel bad. Just like him."

As soon as the words were out of his mouth, Ronan lunged. It was too fast for Adam to dodge, too fast for him to fully process it before Ronan's hand was already fisted in the blanket around his shoulders, tugging him forward. Adam half-fell, his palm slamming into the wood railing next to Ronan's hip so that Ronan was sort of caged in by him. Both of them were breathing hard, and Adam could see the white glint of Ronan's bared teeth.

"Punch me." He hissed, angry and serpentine.

"Fuck you." Adam spit back, confused and even more enraged.

"C'mon, Parrish. If you're such a shit bag, punch me in the face right now. _Do it._ " Ronan jerked on the fistful of blanket he had, jolting Adam even closer.

"This isn't a fucking game, Lynch." He grabbed Ronan's wrist and tried to push off, to get Ronan to let him go, but Ronan didn't budge.

"Sure it is. Let's go, Parrish, I know you know how to throw a right hook. Don't you want to hit me?"

There was something challenging in Ronan's voice that stopped Adam's panicked and infuriated mental spiral. Did he want to hit Ronan? Adam broke eye contact with Ronan, looking out over his shoulder to the field beyond. He tried to imagine punching Ronan, right now, as pissed as he was. He tried to figure out exactly what the thought of punching Ronan made him feel. Nothing. It was nothing. There wasn't fear, like the thought of punching his father. There wasn't guilt, or pleasure, like the thought of punching his mother. There wasn't happiness, or satisfaction, or disgust, or anything at all. There was simply no reason at all that he would punch Ronan.

"No." Adam's grip relaxed around Ronan's wrist, and he slowly slid his gaze back to make eye contact again. "No, I don't want to."

There was a moment of pause, and then the bunch of Adam's blanket that Ronan had been clenching in his fist released, and Ronan grinned.

"See?"

Adam huffed and dropped his forehead against Ronan's chest, almost lightheaded from the wave of relief sweeping through him. He wasn't turning into his father.

"You're such an asshole sometimes."

"Only sometimes? I'll have to work harder on that." One of Ronan's hands rested lightly on the top of his head, and Adam could feel him playing with a few strands of hair.

They stayed there for what felt like ages, Adam slumped against him while Ronan played with his hair, until Adam began to sense a question building up in Ronan.

"Hmm?" Adam mumbled, his voice muffled by both blankets. Ronan hesitated and his hand stilled in Adam's hair.

"What was your dream about?"

Adam sighed. They were at the point where they usually told each other their nightmares. It had been more difficult for Ronan at first, but only because Ronan was more prone to having them. Until recently, Adam hadn't had enough regular sleep to remember any of his dreams, much less his nightmares. Often, there wasn't much explaining necessary anyway, because there had been a long period of time where the demon and Gansey's death had single-handedly fueled both for their nightmares. But occasionally, their nightmares would be based off experiences or fears that weren't shared, and those were much harder.

"I was... Back in the trailer." He started. "It was just the usual stuff, at first, my father was out and I was at home with my mother. Then, I don't know, I guess my father got home. Maybe I did something bad, maybe I didn't, I can't fucking remember. But he started punching me, and kicking me, all the usual stuff."

Adam heard the way Roman's breathing had gone shallow, the way it always did when Adam's family was brought up, but he didn't acknowledge it. There was no point- he knew how Ronan felt about his family, and Ronan knew how he felt about Ronan fighting his battles for him.

"And my mother was just standing there, watching. She didn't do anything at all. At one point I think I asked her to help, which is how I knew it was a dream. She never helped." Adam looked down at his hands. "I think I hate her more for never doing anything than I hate my father for actually hurting me. Does that make sense?"

"Yes." Roman's voice was rough with suppressed anger.

"I think about how she never did anything, and I just get so, so mad. I want to hurt her, to see if she'd do anything to help herself or if it was only me that she couldn't be bothered to care about."

"That doesn't make you like him." Ronan answered the question before Adam had even started to ask it.

They stood in silence for a little while, looking out across the quiet grass and the stars.

"You don't need it, but I would fight every one of your battles, if you let me." Ronan said, quietly. "

I know you would. But you don't, and that is one of the many reasons I love you." Adam heard Ronan inhale quietly at the admission.

It wasn't something new, it was implied in every exchange of _tanquam alter idem_ , but saying it out loud was different than knowing it. It felt heavier, coming from one of their mouths, carried with it all of the baggage that those words had accumulated from both of their pasts. That was exactly what Adam meant in that moment, though. Even with all of their baggage, their shared anger issues, Ronan's bisected childhood, Adam's abusive family, drug issues and dreams, demons and debt, acknowledging all the dirty, messy parts of both of them, he loved Ronan, and he knew Ronan loved him back. Ronan drew closer to him, and Adam simply tilted his head. Their lips met, and Adam knew that, whenever he ended up sleeping again, it would be without any more nightmares, at least for a little bit.

**Author's Note:**

> Nothing like living with my own parents again because the school dorms are closed while I wait to be able to move in with my girlfriend to inspire me to write pynch vent fic!!


End file.
